Posts Tagged 'Four Sparrow Marsh'

Pupating larva, I assume of the Seven-Spotted Lady Beetle (Coccinella septempunctata), adults of which who were all around Four Sparrow Marsh: A species introduced from Europe to eat aphids.

Another commercially available aphid eater is the Convergent Lady Beetle (Hippodamia convergens), which is exported out of California:Like the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, this is also a variable looking species, but it usually has 13 spots and is not nearly as round as the MALB. Found this one on the sidewalk in the Gowanus. Commercially available lady bugs tend to fly out of your garden when released ’cause they ain’t working on Maggie’s farm no more….

In my experience, the internet shrinks the world, whittling our sense of scale. Everything is on a screen now, and so many of us have very small screens indeed in our hands. I’m curious to see where this leads us. I know that when I look at thumbnails on screen, I often don’t have any sense of the actual size. Art, in particular, is often absent internal/external cues or references as to size. Sure, I can sometimes look up the dimensions of the original, but numbers are not very sensational.

On this blog, I do a fair amount of marco-photography, making, essentially, small things bigger. This is partially technologically determined, since my camera doesn’t have a long lens, but also because I want to bring things like seeds, seedpods, feathers, arthropods, etc. into focus, by which I mean your consciousness, or at least your attention.

Above is a detail of a drawing by George Boorujy. You may recognize it as a close-up of a Blue Jay. You may also have some sense of the size of this relatively common bird (which is also highly vocal). It’s bigger than a House Sparrow, smaller than an American Crow. About this image, though, you may be hard-pressed to have a sense of the size of it. Because it does exist on paper, not just digitally. Is it field guide-sized, life-sized, poster-sized?

A praying mantis egg case, or ootheca, from the Greek for egg (oon) and container (theka). Thanks to Amy for spotting and IDing this for me while we were at Four Sparrow Marsh. These are collected and sold for science projects and pest control in gardens, since mantises devour whatever they can get their prayerful legs on. Up to two hundred baby mantises may be in this ootheca. These cases are formed in the fall of eggs and a foamy protein. The protein dries to protect the eggs. The young will emerge after several weeks of warm weather next year, the kind of weather that brings out their prey.

While the wheels of environmental impact statements and economic development grind slowly, the real power behind “development” is rather more rarely revealed. But a lot of attention was paid to this plan, and once you start smacking the hardtack on the table, the maggots do come tumbling out.

One of the local powerbrokers was indicted: State Senator Carl Kruger’s croakings against big box stores were — allegedly — in the service of his own developer buddy (Kruger pled guilty). [UPDATE: Sheepshead Bay Bites is on the beat.] You see, developers are in competition, too, to own the most politicians. Or is it politicians in competition to own the most developers? This week’s detailing of Borough President Marty Markowitz’s modern slush fund, in which developers launder cash through his “charities,” has also opened a door to the behind-the-scenes ugliness of development — and goes a long way to explaining the shit that has been built in Brooklyn in recent years. (Boodle Hall, I call it — in honor of both Tammany and Borough Halls — the capitol of our shining city on a bill.)

Four Sparrow Marsh this early summer day, at low tide. While most everybody else in town was celebrating Gay Pride and the state’s passage of marriage equality (late Friday night, and about time, too), a few of us were being tormented by “mischievous and annoying insects.” I shouldn’t have loaned my head-covering mesh to friends visiting Alaska this weekend. An absolute gauntlet of the little bloodsuckers had to be run through to get to the marsh this morning. Through sedges, grasses, creepers, chest-high mugworts and higher phragmites, and much else ~ this was, after all, a New York City Wildflower Week [extended] walk, and I’m happy to report that there was a thriving mix of species of plants, shrubs, and trees. (See comments for Elizabeth’s list of things seen. See Marielle’s photos here.)

The marsh itself was mosquito-free. And tranquil-looking… but don’t let looks deceive you. Salt-marshes are one of the most productive of ecosystems, nursing fish and many invertebrates, filtering water and absorbing storm surges, pumping blessed oxygen into the air, providing food for everything from bacteria to mammals.

Green with two species of spartina, ringed by phragmites, studded with the keystone ribbed mussels, soft and hard shell clams, mud snails, fiddler crabs, and plentiful little fish in the rising tide. Is this Brooklyn? Yes, it is. A Forever Wild remnant of the salt-marshes that once ringed Jamaica Bay and much of the city. (JFK, LGA, EWR and TEB were all built on salt marshes). But “Forever Wild,” a Parks Department designation without much legal pull, doesn’t mean all that much unless we fight for it.One of a quartet of eastern willets (Tringa semipalmata), this one loudly picketing our presence, perhaps because we were close to a nest (they are salt-marsh breeders), or maybe just on principal. After all, they don’t see too many humans there. On the adjacent upland area, which some people want to turn into yet another parking lot (may they be staked down for the mosquitos), we saw, in addition to the usual suspects, an unexpected male indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea). That was worth pausing for amidst the daredevil skeeters.There are seven mosquito bites on my forehead. Which makes me seven-spotted, like this ladybug, Coccinella septempunctata.

“The draining of the swamp lands is not a new idea. Such lands are not only unproductive of anything which can subserve any important purpose, but they are productive of numerous evils. Teeming with miasma, the home of mischievous and annoying insects they are blotches upon the otherwise fair face of nature. To tender them fruitful and productive of good rather than evil, is a problem for which a solution has been anxiously sought, but heretofore only partially obtained.” ~ Scientific American, 1868

This was thirty years before a definitive connection was made between mosquitoes and malaria. The word malaria means “bad air,” since it was early thought that the miasmas of swamps caused the disease.